OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Modelling and Managing SSD Write-amplification
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2015
Year: 2015

How stable is the performance of your flash-based Solid State Drives (SSDs)? This question is central for database designers and administrators, cloud service providers, and SSD constructors. The answer depends on write-amplification, i.e., garbage collection overhead. More specifically, the answer depends on how write-amplification evolves in time. How then can one model and manage write-amplification, especially when application workloads change? This is the focus of this paper. Managing write-amplification boils down to managing the surplus physical space, called over-provisioned space. Modern SSDs essentially separate the physical space into several partitions, based on the update frequency of the pages they contain, and divide the over-provisioned space among the groups so as to minimize write-amplification. We introduce Wolf, a block manager that allocates over-provisioned space to SSD partitions using a near-optimal closed-form expression, based on the sizes and update frequencies of groups of pages. Our evaluation shows that Wolf is robust to workloads change, with an improvement factor of 2 with respect to the state-of-the-art. We also show that Wolf performs comparably and even slightly better than the state of the art with stable workloads (over 20% improvement with a TPC-C workload).
Multilevel beamforming for high data rate communication in 5G networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

Large antenna arrays can be used to generate highly focused beams that support very high data rates and reduced energy consumption. However, optimal beam focusing requires large amount of feedback from the users in order to choose the best beam, especially in Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) mode. This paper develops a methodology for designing a multilevel codebook of beams in an environment with low number of multipaths. The antenna design supporting the focused beams is formulated as an optimization problem. A multilevel codebook of beams is constructed according to the coverage requirements. An iterative beam scheduling is proposed that searches through the codebook to select the best beam for a given user. The methodology is applied to a mass event and to a rural scenario, both analyzed using an event-based network simulator. Very significant gains are obtained for both scenarios. It is shown that the more dominant the Line of Sight (LoS) component, the higher the gain achieved by the multilevel beamforming.
Ricci-Ollivier Curvature of the Rooted Phylogenetic Subtree-Prune-Regraft Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2015
Year: 2015

Statistical phylogenetic inference methods use tree rearrangement operations to perform either hill-climbing local search or Markov chain Monte Carlo across tree topologies. The canonical class of such moves are the subtree-prune-regraft (SPR) moves that remove a subtree and reattach it somewhere else via the cut edge of the subtree. Phylogenetic trees and such moves naturally form the vertices and edges of a graph, such that tree search algorithms perform a (potentially stochastic) traversal of this SPR graph. Despite the centrality of such graphs in phylogenetic inference, rather little is known about their large-scale properties. In this paper we learn about the rooted-tree version of the graph, known as the rSPR graph, by calculating the Ricci-Ollivier curvature for pairs of vertices in the rSPR graph with respect to two simple random walks on the rSPR graph. By proving theorems and direct calculation with novel algorithms, we find a remarkable diversity of different curvatures on the rSPR graph for pairs of vertices separated by the same distance. We confirm using simulation that degree and curvature have the expected impact on mean access time distributions, demonstrating relevance of these curvature results to stochastic tree search. This indicates significant structure of the rSPR graph beyond that which was previously understood in terms of pairwise distances and vertex degrees; a greater understanding of curvature could ultimately lead to improved strategies for tree search.
Apache VXQuery: A Scalable XQuery Implementation
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2015
Year: 2015

The wide use of XML for document management and data exchange has created the need to query large repositories of XML data. To efficiently query such large data collections and take advantage of parallelism, we have implemented Apache VXQuery, an open-source scalable XQuery processor. The system builds upon two other open-source frameworks -- Hyracks, a parallel execution engine, and Algebricks, a language agnostic compiler toolbox. Apache VXQuery extends these two frameworks and provides an implementation of the XQuery specifics (data model, data-model dependent functions and optimizations, and a parser). We describe the architecture of Apache VXQuery, its integration with Hyracks and Algebricks, and the XQuery optimization rules applied to the query plan to improve path expression efficiency and to enable query parallelism. An experimental evaluation using a real 500GB dataset with various selection, aggregation and join XML queries shows that Apache VXQuery performs well both in terms of scale-up and speed-up. Our experiments show that it is about 3x faster than Saxon (an open-source and commercial XQuery processor) on a 4-core, single node implementation, and around 2.5x faster than Apache MRQL (a MapReduce-based parallel query processor) on an eight (4-core) node cluster.
Influence Maximization under The Non-progressive Linear Threshold Model
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2015
Year: 2015

In the problem of influence maximization in information networks, the objective is to choose a set of initially active nodes subject to some budget constraints such that the expected number of active nodes over time is maximized. The linear threshold model has been introduced to study the opinion cascading behavior, for instance, the spread of products and innovations. In this paper, we we extends the classic linear threshold model [18] to capture the non-progressive be- havior. The information maximization problem under our model is proved to be NP-Hard, even for the case when the underlying network has no directed cycles. The first result of this paper is negative. In general, the objective function of the extended linear threshold model is no longer submodular, and hence the hill climbing approach that is commonly used in the existing studies is not applicable. Next, as the main result of this paper, we prove that if the underlying information network is directed acyclic, the objective function is submodular (and monotone). Therefore, in directed acyclic networks with a specified budget we can achieve 1/2 -approximation on maximizing the number of active nodes over a certain period of time by a deterministic algorithm, and achieve the (1 - 1/e )-approximation by a randomized algorithm.
Situation-Aware Integration and Transmission of Safety Information for Smart Railway Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

Recent trend of railway train development can be characterized in several aspects : high speed, infortainment, intelligence in driving, and so on. In particular, trend of high speed in driving is prominent and competition for high speed amongst several techno-savvy countries is becoming severe. To achieve high speed, engines or motors are distributed over multiple vehicles of train to provide increased motive power, while a single engine or motor has been mostly used for conventional trains. Increased speed and more complicated powertrain system naturally incur much higher chance of massive accidents. From this perspective, importance of proactive safety control before accident takes place cannot be over-emphasized. To implement proactive safety control requires situation-aware integration and transmission of safety information obtained from IoT sensors. Types of critical IoT sensors depend on situational conditions. Thus, integration and transmission of safety information should be performed with IoT sensors providing the safety information proper for faced situation. This brief paper is to devise a methodology how to operate IoT sensor network enabling proactive safety control for railway vehicles and to propose a queue management based medium access control scheme.
Efficient indexing of necklaces and irreducible polynomials over finite fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2015
Year: 2015

We study the problem of indexing irreducible polynomials over finite fields, and give the first efficient algorithm for this problem. Specifically, we show the existence of poly(n, log q)-size circuits that compute a bijection between {1, ... , |S|} and the set S of all irreducible, monic, univariate polynomials of degree n over a finite field F_q. This has applications in pseudorandomness, and answers an open question of Alon, Goldreich, Håstad and Peralta[AGHP]. Our approach uses a connection between irreducible polynomials and necklaces ( equivalence classes of strings under cyclic rotation). Along the way, we give the first efficient algorithm for indexing necklaces of a given length over a given alphabet, which may be of independent interest.
Run Time Approximation of Non-blocking Service Rates for Streaming Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2015
Year: 2015

Stream processing is a compute paradigm that promises safe and efficient parallelism. Modern big-data problems are often well suited for stream processing's throughput-oriented nature. Realization of efficient stream processing requires monitoring and optimization of multiple communications links. Most techniques to optimize these links use queueing network models or network flow models, which require some idea of the actual execution rate of each independent compute kernel within the system. What we want to know is how fast can each kernel process data independent of other communicating kernels. This is known as the "service rate" of the kernel within the queueing literature. Current approaches to divining service rates are static. Modern workloads, however, are often dynamic. Shared cloud systems also present applications with highly dynamic execution environments (multiple users, hardware migration, etc.). It is therefore desirable to continuously re-tune an application during run time (online) in response to changing conditions. Our approach enables online service rate monitoring under most conditions, obviating the need for reliance on steady state predictions for what are probably non-steady state phenomena. First, some of the difficulties associated with online service rate determination are examined. Second, the algorithm to approximate the online non-blocking service rate is described. Lastly, the algorithm is implemented within the open source RaftLib framework for validation using a simple microbenchmark as well as two full streaming applications.
A Survey on Methods and Systems for Graph Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

We present an informal survey (meant to accompany another paper) on graph compression methods. We focus on lossless methods, briefly list available pproaches, and compare them where possible or give some indicators on their compression ratios. We also mention some relevant results from the field of lossy compression and algorithms specialized for the use on large graphs. --- Note: The comparison is by no means complete. This document is a first draft and will be updated and extended.
The Gram-Charlier A Series based Extended Rule-of-Thumb for Bandwidth Selection in Univariate and Multivariate Kernel Density Estimations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

The article derives a novel Gram-Charlier A (GCA) Series based Extended Rule-of-Thumb (ExROT) for bandwidth selection in Kernel Density Estimation (KDE). There are existing various bandwidth selection rules achieving minimization of the Asymptotic Mean Integrated Square Error (AMISE) between the estimated probability density function (PDF) and the actual PDF. The rules differ in a way to estimate the integration of the squared second order derivative of an unknown PDF $(f(\cdot))$, identified as the roughness $R(f''(\cdot))$. The simplest Rule-of-Thumb (ROT) estimates $R(f''(\cdot))$ with an assumption that the density being estimated is Gaussian. Intuitively, better estimation of $R(f''(\cdot))$ and consequently better bandwidth selection rules can be derived, if the unknown PDF is approximated through an infinite series expansion based on a more generalized density assumption. As a demonstration and verification to this concept, the ExROT derived in the article uses an extended assumption that the density being estimated is near Gaussian. This helps use of the GCA expansion as an approximation to the unknown near Gaussian PDF. The ExROT for univariate KDE is extended to that for multivariate KDE. The required multivariate AMISE criteria is re-derived using elementary calculus of several variables, instead of Tensor calculus. The derivation uses the Kronecker product and the vector differential operator to achieve the AMISE expression in vector notations. There is also derived ExROT for kernel based density derivative estimator.
Synergy of Volunteer Measurements and Volunteer Computing for Effective Data Collecting, Processing, Simulating and Analyzing on a Worldwide Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2015
Year: 2015

The paper concerns the hype idea of "Citizen Science" and the related paradigm shift: to go from the passive "volunteer computing" to other volunteer actions like "volunteer measurements" under guidance of scientists. They can be carried out by ordinary people with standard computing gadgets (smartphone, tablet, etc.) and the various standard sensors in them. Here the special attention is paid to the system of volunteer scientific measurements to study air showers caused by cosmic rays. The technical implementation is based on integration of data about registered night flashes (by radiometric software) in shielded camera chip, synchronized time and GPS-data in ordinary gadgets: to identify night "air showers" of elementary particles; to analyze the frequency and to map the distribution of "air showers" in the densely populated cities. The project currently includes the students of the National Technical University of Ukraine "KPI", which are compactly located in Kyiv city and contribute their volunteer measurements. The technology would be very effective for other applications also, especially if it will be automated (e.g., on the basis of XtremWeb or/and BOINC technologies for distributed computing) and used in some small area with many volunteers, e.g. in local communities (Corporative/Community Crowd Computing).
Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Visible Light Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

The main limitation of visible light communication (VLC) is the narrow modulation bandwidth, which reduces the achievable data rates. In this paper, we apply the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme to enhance the achievable throughput in high-rate VLC downlink networks. We first propose a novel gain ratio power allocation (GRPA) strategy that takes into account the users' channel conditions to ensure efficient and fair power allocation. Our results indicate that GRPA significantly enhances system performance compared to the static power allocation. We also study the effect of tuning the transmission angles of the light emitting diodes (LEDs) and the field of views (FOVs) of the receivers, and demonstrate that these parameters can offer new degrees of freedom to boost NOMA performance. Simulation results reveal that NOMA is a promising multiple access scheme for the downlink of VLC networks.
Approximately Counting Triangles in Sublinear Time
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

We consider the problem of estimating the number of triangles in a graph. This problem has been extensively studied in both theory and practice, but all existing algorithms read the entire graph. In this work we design a {\em sublinear-time\/} algorithm for approximating the number of triangles in a graph, where the algorithm is given query access to the graph. The allowed queries are degree queries, vertex-pair queries and neighbor queries. We show that for any given approximation parameter $0<ε<1$, the algorithm provides an estimate $\widehat{t}$ such that with high constant probability, $(1-ε)\cdot t< \widehat{t}<(1+ε)\cdot t$, where $t$ is the number of triangles in the graph $G$. The expected query complexity of the algorithm is $\!\left(\frac{n}{t^{1/3}} + \min\left\{m, \frac{m^{3/2}}{t}\right\}\right)\cdot {\rm poly}(\log n, 1/ε)$, where $n$ is the number of vertices in the graph and $m$ is the number of edges, and the expected running time is $\!\left(\frac{n}{t^{1/3}} + \frac{m^{3/2}}{t}\right)\cdot {\rm poly}(\log n, 1/ε)$. We also prove that $Ω\!\left(\frac{n}{t^{1/3}} + \min\left\{m, \frac{m^{3/2}}{t}\right\}\right)$ queries are necessary, thus establishing that the query complexity of this algorithm is optimal up to polylogarithmic factors in $n$ (and the dependence on $1/ε$).
Temporal Localization of Fine-Grained Actions in Videos by Domain Transfer from Web Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

We address the problem of fine-grained action localization from temporally untrimmed web videos. We assume that only weak video-level annotations are available for training. The goal is to use these weak labels to identify temporal segments corresponding to the actions, and learn models that generalize to unconstrained web videos. We find that web images queried by action names serve as well-localized highlights for many actions, but are noisily labeled. To solve this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method that takes weak video labels and noisy image labels as input, and generates localized action frames as output. This is achieved by cross-domain transfer between video frames and web images, using pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks. We then use the localized action frames to train action recognition models with long short-term memory networks. We collect a fine-grained sports action data set FGA-240 of more than 130,000 YouTube videos. It has 240 fine-grained actions under 85 sports activities. Convincing results are shown on the FGA-240 data set, as well as the THUMOS 2014 localization data set with untrimmed training videos.
Sparse regression with highly correlated predictors
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

We consider a linear regression $y=Xβ+u$ where $X\in\mathbb{\mathbb{R}}^{n\times p}$, $p\gg n,$ and $β$ is $s$-sparse. Motivated by examples in financial and economic data, we consider the situation where $X$ has highly correlated and clustered columns. To perform sparse recovery in this setting, we introduce the \emph{clustering removal algorithm} (CRA), that seeks to decrease the correlation in $X$ by removing the cluster structure without changing the parameter vector $β$. We show that as long as certain assumptions hold about $X$, the decorrelated matrix will satisfy the restricted isometry property (RIP) with high probability. We also provide examples of the empirical performance of CRA and compare it with other sparse recovery techniques.
Mapeamento Sistematico
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2015
Year: 2015

A systematic mapping is a way to identify, evaluate and interpret all relevant research available to a matter of particular research. One of the reasons for conducting systematic reviews is that it summarizes the existing evidence regarding treatment or technology [Kitchenham, 2004].
The End of Slow Networks: It's Time for a Redesign
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2015
Year: 2015

Next generation high-performance RDMA-capable networks will require a fundamental rethinking of the design and architecture of modern distributed DBMSs. These systems are commonly designed and optimized under the assumption that the network is the bottleneck: the network is slow and "thin", and thus needs to be avoided as much as possible. Yet this assumption no longer holds true. With InfiniBand FDR 4x, the bandwidth available to transfer data across network is in the same ballpark as the bandwidth of one memory channel, and it increases even further with the most recent EDR standard. Moreover, with the increasing advances of RDMA, the latency improves similarly fast. In this paper, we first argue that the "old" distributed database design is not capable of taking full advantage of the network. Second, we propose architectural redesigns for OLTP, OLAP and advanced analytical frameworks to take better advantage of the improved bandwidth, latency and RDMA capabilities. Finally, for each of the workload categories, we show that remarkable performance improvements can be achieved.
An Online Approach to Dynamic Channel Access and Transmission Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

Making judicious channel access and transmission scheduling decisions is essential for improving performance as well as energy and spectral efficiency in multichannel wireless systems. This problem has been a subject of extensive study in the past decade, and the resulting dynamic and opportunistic channel access schemes can bring potentially significant improvement over traditional schemes. However, a common and severe limitation of these dynamic schemes is that they almost always require some form of a priori knowledge of the channel statistics. A natural remedy is a learning framework, which has also been extensively studied in the same context, but a typical learning algorithm in this literature seeks only the best static policy, with performance measured by weak regret, rather than learning a good dynamic channel access policy. There is thus a clear disconnect between what an optimal channel access policy can achieve with known channel statistics that actively exploits temporal, spatial and spectral diversity, and what a typical existing learning algorithm aims for, which is the static use of a single channel devoid of diversity gain. In this paper we bridge this gap by designing learning algorithms that track known optimal or sub-optimal dynamic channel access and transmission scheduling policies, thereby yielding performance measured by a form of strong regret, the accumulated difference between the reward returned by an optimal solution when a priori information is available and that by our online algorithm. We do so in the context of two specific algorithms that appeared in [1] and [2], respectively, the former for a multiuser single-channel setting and the latter for a single-user multichannel setting. In both cases we show that our algorithms achieve sub-linear regret uniform in time and outperforms the standard weak-regret learning algorithms.